Friday, September 13, 2013

In our continued series profiling +Fulbright Program alumni, today we feature a post by Aiste Ptakauske who traveled this summer to the New York City to spend a month at the +Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab. Here is her essay about the experience.

The summer of 2013 was the nineteenth summer in a row when the
Lincoln Center Theater (LCT) gathered directors from all over the world into an
LCT Directors Lab. For three weeks the LCT Directors Lab provided its
participants with a truly lab-like environment where theater-makers experimented
with their processes and ideas in hope to discover newer, better, fresher, and
more exciting ways to create theater. All experiments were geared in one
direction: from Page to Stage.

How do we direct contemporary plays for
contemporary audiences?
What should be the relationship between the playwright
and the director in the room?
What are the processes of developing new plays?

Coming to the Lab, we all thought we’d find answers to these questions. But these questions appeared to be just the tip of a much larger and harder iceberg…

‘Is it true that three basic human instincts are food, sex, and the urge to
re-write somebody else’s play?’, asked +Anne Cattaneo, the Director of the LCT
Directors Lab, in her welcome address to the Lab participants. ‘Isn’t it funny that
so many people know how to re-write a play and so few know how to write one?’, echoed
her John Guare, the acclaimed author of Six Degrees of Separation, in a round-table discussion with Edward Albee. John Guare and Edward Albee created a
unique phenomenon in the American theater. When Edward Albee’s ‘Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?’ hit the Broadway stage, critics called it ‘a play for dirty-minded
women’.

‘Which actually was a good thing!’, Edward Albee childishly chuckled remembering
this review. That play (maybe, indeed, with a little bit of help from the
review in question) made a lot of money that Edward Albee invested in a
theater. ‘I just wanted to put on plays that I wanted to see and thought other
people should see’, he explained. That
theater became a stepping-stone for an entire new generation of American
playwrights (including the aforementioned John Guare).

‘Can we imagine anyone
doing the same thing now: investing their money in a theater, in their
professional community?’, wondered Anne Cattaneo. There were as many answers to
this question as there were directors in the Lab: 72 opinions from 27
countries, to be exact. And every answer was met with a dozen of new questions.
That turned out to be a rule of the Lab: the number of questions asked always exceeded
the number of answers given. Which actually was a good thing! In the
contemporary society theater makers (and artists in general) are pressured too much by the
demand to give answers. Theaters want to know how much the production
will cost. Financiers want to know how fast they are getting their investment
back. Grant giving bodies want to know how many people will see the play and how deeply they will be
affected. Everyone wants to know what’s the most efficient process to achieve
the best results. In our result-oriented times we’re so busy giving answers
that we forget to ask ourselves a very important question: ‘Why am I doing
this?’

By the end of the LCT Directors Lab I came to realize that this was the
only question that ever mattered. To me, the answer to it was fairly obvious:
we do what we do because we care. Whether it’s a war in Syria, genocide in
Rwanda, racial discrimination in the States or brain drain in Lithuania, we
cannot just sit back and watch. We want to know why, how, what the hell… It was
so refreshing to have a space such as the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab
where these questions could be asked without any pressure to give answers, with
a premeditated understanding that answers to such questions may never be found.

‘Clarity is overrated’, Sarah Ruhl explained her policy of giving answers. ‘Creativity
is magic. Don’t examine it too closely’ was Edward Albee’s advice on a
completely different occasion and to a completely different audience. This magic
idiosyncracy of two great minds of contemporary American theater made me think:
in Lithuania we seem to be obsessed with looking for the best recipes (maybe
that explains the inconceivable popularity of cook books)
in all spheres of our lives (How to write a perfect play? How to make a perfect
movie? How to define a perfect family? How to elect a perfect Parliament? How
to create a perfect state?) while in reality no matter what we do – direct a
play, raise a family, run a state – to do it well, we only need each other. So
that was my big discovery at the LCT Directors Lab: nothing I do in theater or
in life will ever work or matter unless I always bear in mind who I’m doing it with and
whom I’m doing it for.

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